The hurt feelings of our Froggie pals

http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | ARLES, France
You know the world is turned
upside down, so the popular jest
goes, when the top rapper is a
white boy, the best golfer is black,
the Germans "don't want to study
war no more," the Russians want
to play kind and gentle, the
Chinese are offended by
diplomatic rudeness, and the
French complain about arrogance.

But it's not just about
arrogance. The French, as dozens
of them demonstrated to me during
my week of ranging across the
glorious spring-struck Gallic countryside by river and rail,
have suffered grievous war wounds.
We've hurt their feelings.

"I don't understand it," said a distinguished physician,
turning to me at a Paris dinner party. She had tears in her
voice if not in her big brown eyes. "I just don't know what
we've done to deserve this. Pouring out good wine to make a
political point, calling french fries 'freedom fries.' It's not like
we've taken Saddam Hussein as a lover. We thought we and
the Americans were friends."

Friends or lovers, the relationship is strained, but once
beyond the circle of officialdom and the chattering class, a
visitor has to search for harsh words, hateful glances and
clever insults. A little unimaginative graffiti ("USA =
Terrorists"), as on the Rhone riverfront here in Arles where
Vincent van Gogh cut off his ear and inspired a Van
Gogh-exploitation industry, is about the only evidence of
anger an American visitor is likely to find.

Nevertheless, watching the climb-down of Jacques Chirac
and listening to the uncertain voices in the din of the chattering
class is bracing entertainment for an American. M. Chirac's
famous telephone call to George W. Bush was widely
remarked here, and grudgingly praised as the humiliating
gesture necessary to start putting the past into the past. Or so
they hope. If there's scant evidence of French anger at "les
Anglo-Saxons," there's even less understanding of the depth
of American and British fury. It's bad French luck that the
Gallic inventory of insults has no equivalent of "cheese-eating
surrender monkeys." (But better to be a cheese-eating
surrender monkey, grumbles a German businessman in a
sidewalk café opposite the old hospital where Van Gogh's
ear was patched up, "than to be called a 'peace Nazi.' ")

The French newspapers, which reflected the dismay of the
French public as "les Anglo-Saxons" fired up their machines
of war, reflected sober second thoughts as the Americans
and British sacked up Basra and bagged Baghdad in 21 days
with a remarkably small expenditure of blood, either of their
own or of the Iraqi civilians. "The Americans have won the
war," conceded the right-wing Le Figaro, "and in only three
weeks. It is a victory for George Bush." Le Monde, stylishly
leftist, finally conceded that Saddam was a monster ("The
dictator who terrorized Iraq"), and like much of the French
media was suddenly eager to detail the coarse cruelty and
inventive depravity of the regime that M. Chirac and his
odious foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, defended so
resolutely only a month ago.

"The French are discovering the truth," says Francois
Gere of the Institute of Diplomacy and Defense, "and that the
coalition was efficient." Philippe Moreau Defarges, an analyst
at the Institute of International Relations in Paris, agrees, sort
of, as if he were discussing a particularly stinky cheese: "We
are starting to hear a more dissonant voice in France. The
U.S. victory has made the debate more complex."

Well, maybe not quite as complex as a stinky cheese.

Philippe Seguin, a former president of the National Assembly,
demands a more virile Frenchman to stand up to "les
Anglo-Saxons." M. Chirac's opposition to the liberation of
Iraq was something "of which we were all so proud," he
wrote in Le Monde, and France had not "come to the bank
of the Rubicon in order to go fishing."

What the French obviously want, with passionate
desperation, is for conflict with the Islamic world to go away,
if only for a while. (After that their grandchildren can worry
about it.) The Islamic world is not an abstraction somewhere
else, but real and right here. Muslims are approaching 10
percent of the French population of 60 million, and
everybody is running scared. Islam is the second religion
already, not far behind practicing Catholics in numbers and
far ahead of the Protestants and the Jews. "The pessimists
among us predict that France will be an Islamic nation
sometime this century," a professor of law tells me. "The
optimists say no, it will require a full hundred years."

Only this week, the French interior minister insisted that
Muslim women must take off their veils to be photographed
for the national identity cards that all French citizens are
required to carry. He noted that Catholic nuns uncover their
heads willingly. Muslim imams said nothing doing. Since "the
veil is what makes Muslim women special," they're entitled to
have only their veils photographed.

So the world is upside-down here, too. Righting it will
take a little time, even for les Anglo-Saxons.